The words of Macron and Trump vibrate like the drums of war.
Lockdown sounds like bracing ourselves for a missile attack.
Well-trained, we comply with the new order of things. No questions asked. We are reassured: the supermarkets will remain open throughout this crisis. But we don’t quite believe it. We strip the shelves bare.
We can’t see this powerful enemy that is turning our world upside down, erasing things that we thought permanent, creating burials with no mourners, sons and daughters not being able to hold the hands of their parents as they lie dying. Our enemy is a packet of genetic information of size ∼30 kb. The scientists tell us that it hijacks our cells and starts copying itself.
We are told that our leaders will destroy the virus, whatever it takes. We will win this war … even though in part it is against our own Mother Nature!
Conspiracy theorists awaken like a bush fire. It’s an agent of biowarfare, they argue.
We need to make sense of this war.
Some point the finger at others. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry already observed almost 80 years ago in The Little Prince:
“It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.”
At the same time, Abhijit Naskar’s words “We have the neurological potential to be truly a wise species, unlike any other species on Earth” are our light at the horizon.
Maybe something is taken from us that we don’t want to give away: our lifestyle, our comforts, our possessions.
Life is on hold, but what was life like before this contagion pressed the pause button?
The truth is that good quality life, real life, has been becoming shorter by the day.
Debilitating stress is too big a part of too many lives. We spend time in sickness not in health.
Our bookstores are filling up with self-help literature. Stress studies are proliferating to show what stress is doing to our health. Rehabilitation clinics are filling up with young people who become ill to autoimmunity or strokes. People are longing for timeouts, literature that gives them a break for reflection, meditation, to get a short break from this insanity. But they are now even running out of time for reading or practicing these ways out. The escape doors are closing while our demanding lifestyles are occupying more and more doors.
Even more so our discussions now. The lockdowns force a shutdown of our economy. The Dow is crashing. People cannot pay their bills anymore. Joblessness is sky rocketing. Businesses are going bust. Government debt will take decades to repay. Covid-19 has also seemingly caused family frictions within days.
Is the solution to get back to “normal” as quickly as we can? Make the vaccines, find the medicines, bury the dead and jump back on the conveyor belt.
Do we really want our pre-Covid 19 lives back? The “normality” that makes us sick, our families sick, our planet sick, and everyone around us? The “normality” that is evidently unable to carry us through crisis? Or do we want to draw an important lesson from this pandemic by asking us what we actually need, and possibly realizing that having less comes with having much more abundance than money could ever buy? So that in our new life after Covid-19, we don’t have to buy the self-help books on how to stay grounded, but we can just live our life fulfilled, not only during breaks that are dictated by our calendars?
So, maybe we don’t just pick up that baggage again and hang it round our necks.
What that would be like?
We are living it right now, as a trial period!
Putting our fears about the future aside: How are we actually doing right now?
Voices say, all our senses are firing with vitality as never before.
We are thankful to see – the suddenly blue skies above us, or the souls of our kids and loved ones, whom we haven’t had time to pay enough attention to for a long time.
We are thankful to feel – our connection with others and their warm interpersonal outreach in response to our needs.
We are thankful to smell – the clean air in our towns and cities.
We are thankful to touch – because we realize now, in times of social distancing, the healing energy of touch that we now have to forgo some time.
We are thankful to taste – the unpolluted springtime in the air, and the meals that we now have time to prepare and enjoy at home.
We are thankful to hear – our inner voice again, and the voices of our loved ones, because the noise pollution has gone down so that we can hear again.
Interestingly, it seems as if our sudden calmness passes on to all other life on Earth around us. Our planet can breathe again. The whales can hear each other again across our oceans, the sonic screaming from our shipping lanes is gone, they can find their food and flock again. How powerful we are, with our potential to cause either calmness or distress, not just to ourselves but to the entire world around us. Collateral damage from our way of life.
What will we use this power for?
Covid-19 is waking something in us that we haven’t felt in a long time. It’s our heart. Our empathy for one another, for our species. Our longing for helping each other. The deep joy in our hearts and souls that we usually only get a couple of days in the year when our calendars tell us that today is a day to gift someone, be it for their birthdays, Christmas or whatever other fixed calendar entry it is. Now the stores are closed. We can’t buy gifts! So what gift will we give ourselves?
Covid-19 is not “cruel.” It’s not our “enemy.” It’s just a virus doing what it needs to do. But within the dark tunnel of fear it has driven us into, we can sense warm light appearing between us humans.
What is this light showing us about ourselves?
Is this situation talking to us about the survival of human kind or the survival of the Dow?
We must now heal Humankind.
Imagine you could!
A dream or a vision?
We created human life on this planet the way it is.
We can recreate it into a different life. A life with a future perspective.
Sometimes, it’s time to change things that don’t work anymore.
Will we release the pause button and play on like before … or will we leave it stuck?
— Annegret Hannawa